“City Bad, County Good”

It’s a favorite refrain these days of voters outside Memphis: If only Memphis would quit electing incompetent elected officials, the members of the white flight brigade would be willing to vote for consolidation.

Of course, it’s all rhetoric. There’s nothing that’s ever going to be good enough that these “county” voters won’t find some reason to vote against consolidation. But that’s not the point of this post.

Instead, it’s this threadbare narrative that goes unchecked by the news media that the leadership outside Memphis is highly qualified and the leadership inside Memphis is inept and ill-equipped for their jobs. If anybody should be making those comments about ineptitude, it should be Memphians talking about suburban elected officials.

When you look at these suburban politicians as a group, it leads you to believe that there must have been some cosmic event that allowed Mark Norris to be elected state senator. While we don’t agree with him often, at least his positions are reasoned and call into use the brain cells reserved for logic. He’s surrounded by a motley group that play to the lowest common denominator, pandering to the fears of their constituents about “those people” in Memphis and pursuing such enlightened political positions as guns in parks and restaurants.

Undebatable

We’re thinking of all this as we watched the WREG-TV consolidation debate Monday night and saw Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland and his sidekick, Jon Crisp, belittle Memphis leaders. It was a remarkable assertion, especially considering that the Millington commissioner mangled the facts as easily as he mangled the rules of grammar.

He complained that the charter commission didn’t give the public enough time to consider the new charter (state law sets the timeline), he complained that single source funding will increase taxes (single source funding is state law), he said that there is no real annexation in our future (actually Memphis has 150 more square miles it can annex), and criticisms that Memphis should get its house in order (although it’s his county government that’s driving up taxes and costs of government here, not Memphis).

All this just reminded us once again that Memphians should refuse once and for all to listen to the underlying narrative of the suburbs – that white Republicans are good and African-American Democrats are bad. Suburban criticisms ignore the white Democrats in this sweeping criticism of all things political in Memphis, giving credence to the suspicions that race plays a part in this scapegoating.

In the end, everything is broken down into phrases that would have made Tarzan proud: county good, city bad.

Mental Ammunition

What’s missing is any thoughtful discourse about the issues that really matter or any objective discussion of the facts. The suburban “leaders” regularly take their message to the basest bias of their voters: Memphis is bad, Memphians are the problem, we have to protect ourselves from Memphis, we need our guns to protect ourselves from those people.

It’s a sad commentary on suburban voters, but it’s a reminder that our low educational attainment level is not merely reflected in the people living in poverty inside Memphis, but the people living in their own selfish superiority outside Memphis.

There’s always been a vein of anti-intellectualism in Southern politics (it seems to have spread to a national level these days) and the victors at the polls for suburban elected offices remind us of the power of fear over facts every day.

Why Are These White People So Mad?

Outside Memphis, all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. Out in God’s country, people are smarter, richer, and happier.

So, what in the heck happens to all these superior people when they enter the voting booth? What are they so angry about? Where does all this hostility come from if it’s not essentially race-based?

It’s hard for us to say. Although it’s tempting to chalk up all of this to the neverending yin and yang of race in our community, perhaps they’re just mad, period. And they fail to see the contradictions in so much of what they say, as Mr. Crisp did last night when he blamed this amorphous Memphis for the decline of Frayser, Whitehaven and Hickory Hill. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s also a blame the victim tactic.

Those areas weren’t doomed when they were annexed by Memphis. It’s worth remembering that Frayser was annexed 50 years ago and Whitehaven 40 years ago, and despite what some people are saying, they receive all services of City of Memphis.

Blaming the Victim

More to the point, a fundamental part of the problem isn’t about Memphis at all. It is the way that Shelby County Government turned the roles of government inside out.

County government wasn’t supposed to provide urban services, but once the office of county mayor was created, mayors wanted to lock in the non-Memphis vote and they did it by providing services that are normally and logically provided by cities.

As a result, county government eroded the dividing line between county and city services and weakened the legal logic that said urban services come with city taxes. It’s also what drove up the costs of county government and created the mentality that made sprawl acceptable. It also fed the “we versus they” attitude that is so pervasive here, but especially in the ‘burbs, and it wasn’t about a grand philosophy of government at all, it was about political advantage.

It’s also laughable to hear a county commission from Millington – stagnant in jobs growth, population growth flat, poverty rising, and neighborhoods deteriorating – criticize Memphis neighborhoods for their lack of progress and success. But here’s the main thing: It wasn’t city government that caused Frayser, Whitehaven and Hickory Hill to have problems. It was white flight, the abandonment of the city for reasons personal and racial. That’s why it’s so galling to hear some suburbanites blaming Memphis officials. It was whites who set the deterioration in motion, and now, they blame the people who stayed behind to try and fix it up.

Exhausted Rhetoric

Their resolve to paint Memphis with a broad brush is testament to a characteristic that defines politics way too much these days. It’s all about them. It’s all about winning and losing, no matter what degree of pandering it takes.

So in addition to guns in parks and restaurants, suburban politicians offer up legislation that would prevent Memphis from passing living wage ordinances, that would close public records of people with permits to carry guns, that would dumb down ethics rules and weaken public meetings laws, that would use schools as vehicles for their version of Christianity, that would have rejected stimulus funding, well, you get the picture.

It’s a cynical strategy in which there is no saturation point for partisanship and the self-motivation of their own political success, damn the best interests of the community or any responsibility to contribute to meaningful public discussion or to healing our divisions.

That why we are so tired of these suburban voters and officials always having a mote in their own eyes when it comes to Memphis elected officials. To make their point, they can always quickly summon of the names of a handful of Memphis officials while ignoring the vast majority who care about public service and take it seriously and conscientiously.

It’s the worst kind of stereotyping and it gets way too much use outside Memphis.

28 Comments

I agree 100%. Shelby County is way to divided. The suburbs reason for not wanting consolidation because “bad Memphis government” is nonsense. I believe the root of hate for Memphis stems beyond government. I also believe most of this fear is coming from suburban mayors afraid of losing power. The people who always make bad comments on “Memphis needs to get house in order” never offer any solutions because deep down they don’t want Memphis to become successful.

I saw the debate on News Channel 3 as well. I’ve never seen such fear mongering and misrepresentation of facts in all my life. Did Terry Roland see how he acted? He made a complete fool of himself. When be wasn’t yelling, he was slumped over in his chair twiddling his pen. How embarrassing. How does someone watch that and not see the contrast in thinking. It was old school vs. new school.

Also, lumping Cordova in with Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, etc. made me scream. That was the biggest bunch of crap I have ever seen.

One more thing. One point that the anti consolidation folks made that made me laugh was watching them brag about .385 attracting businesses that were looking to relocate. Newsflash, if a company moves from Memphis to the suburbs, that is not economic development. That does not bring in new industry into the region. These guys need a lesson in Economics.

Thank you…thank you..thank you. People who have no argument always act like somebody is playing the race card because they’ve got nothing. And businessman proved your point completely with his inane and ignorant slur. So typical.

I’m a former Memphian who left a few years ago and I’ve been watching these events unfold with great interest. It’s exciting to see that someone is FINALLY correctly pointing the finger at white flight.
I currently live in Boston, and people who live in our outlying towns tend to have a lot of civic pride. These are people whose families have lived in these cities for, in some cases,300+ years. How long has Germantown been a large city? Answer: since desegregation really started to set in. It’s preposterous that Memphis suburbanites blame Memphis for the county-at-large’s problems, that they continue to drive a wedge between the city and the rest of the county (that’s another thing: let’s stop calling it “the county”; it’s only part of the county!). Most of Memphis’ suburban residents moved there from Memphis. It’s not as though they’ve moved across the friggin’ country. Gimme a break.
I hope and pray that the Memphis city government figures out a way to tax the hell out of these people. At this point, the city might as well just build a wall around itself; if you don’t want to pay for the police protection to keep you safe when you walk from your car to Fedex Forum, or for the fire department to douse your engine when it catches on fire, maybe you shouldn’t be coming to visit in the first place. It’s completely unethical to take what you want from a place, to call some aspects of it home, while shunning its not-so-wonderful aspects. That’s city life, suburbanites. If you don’t like it, move to the boondocks in an area where you don’t have to look at people who are different from you.

I am constantly reminded how Memphis suburbs are treating the central city like northern industrial cities were treated in the 1920s. As a famous Memphian, Kenneth Jackson told us in his book “Crabgrass Frontier”, the suburbs of northern cities killed annexation because they didn’t want to share governing with the poor, ethnic Europeans who worked in central city factories.

We will never advance economically until the suburbs and central city (Memphis) start accepting each other and coming together for strength. Otherwise we will become the next rust belt. Besides, our suburbs would not even exist without Memphis. Germantown (et al) is Memphis!

I agree with you on your assessment of suburban “leaders” who trash the wicked city. In addition to that, there are the inner city, mainly African Americans with the old attitude of us against them, that they will have their majority decreased from 63% to about 55%.

All in all, many will have to give up something for consolidation. The question is what the overall community will gain and that seems to be the shoved aside in much of the debate. All of those who are against seem to ask, “What’s in it for me?”

I would have preferred that good marketing would have sought to shame that attitude more than it has.

To admit that the failures of the area are in fact shared by suburban and county leadership would be committing political suicide and for those who can no longer fathom employment outside of the political realm this would result in the end of their livelihoods. Similarly, the suburban leadership is doing exactly what a suburb would do in a situation as politically charged as this one. If they were to suggest that we as a metropolitan area share a similar social and economic fate and that differences are both trivial and should be set aside for the good of the region, they would be essentially stating that the reason for their municipal existence is based on superficial and shallow motivations. These communities exist based almost entirely on their sales pitch to developers and the public that they are radically different from their neighbors and they can enjoy the benefits of an urban lifestyle without bearing the full responsibility for its existence or upkeep. To admit that Germantown and Collierville are essentially duplicates would beg the question of maintaining them as separate entities. The existence of suburban municipalities requires these places and their residents to paint as dark a picture as possible of their primary urban counterpart. If they did not, why would anyone consider moving and remaining there? This brings us back full circle- the existence of these so called leaders’ jobs require the existence of their towns which in turn owe their existence to their leaders reminding their own population how they are superior to their neighbors (even if it is not true). Thus it is not surprising to see a mayor make such statements.

Amen! What a GREAT post – so on-target. This is the kind of stuff we should see in the CA. Keep up the good fight, SCM. The detractors can hate all they want – for some reason, they can’t stand people sticking up for Memphis and trying to make it a better place. I wish they would all just move far, far away and let us try to progress things around here. I keep thinking of the Louisville Mayor’s comment that you can’t be a suburb of nowhere. Do they really actually believe that Poplar Ave. in east Mphs could replace the downtown city core?! If so, we’re in worse shape than I thought because we’re surrounded by lunatics. We’ll continue to support you and your efforts to make our city a better place for us all – we may lose this year (I hope we won’t but with the county vote and all of their biases, we might), but we’ll be back on the ballot in another 2 years. And we’ll keep trying after that if we have to. It’s taken other cities years to finally wake everyone up on the pros of consolidation and it may take a while here too. Regardless, we’ll keep trying. Thanks for your tireless efforts on behalf of all of us. Don’t let the haters get you down – they just need something to do in between their tea party rallies.

“White flight” is a symptom not a cause, the same thing that causes white flight is what got us here, not the other way around.
Blaming everything on white flight is stupid, it was preceded by something else, and something blocked fixing that before the only recourse for those not looking for more trouble with no possibility of enacting an effective solution FLED the vicinity of the problem.

You don’t stand still when a guy shoots at your feet (or anything else).

What got us here was just lazy thinking and greed on the part of people charged with creating solutions, and they didn’t have the intellectual capital or will, because they were more interested in the big bucks.
That’s how it happens, everywhere.

What a GREAT post! Reading this I almost forgot that I was in Memphis. It’s refreshing to know that there are people who really see the situation for what it is, who are not minorities, and can’t be accused of playing the race card.

Urbanut: I’m not sure I agree. This myopic view of the world and anti-Memphis sentiment existed long before the present political climate. It’s about something that runs a lot deeper than political survival. These people aren’t cleverly expressing their political talking points. They are repeating what they really think and that’s what is scary about them.

Brian, white flight wasn’t a symptom in Whitehaven, it WAS the major cause. When black people started to move in, white people moved out en masse, (and I mean EN MASSE, you can’t believe how many homes went up for sale in a short period of time)and the real estate companies encouraged, abetted and furthered that white flight, they would purposely put a black family in a house on a block and then canvas every white homeowner in that block to see if they wanted to list their house for sale. That happened, it was real.

Phil- you could be right and maybe I am giving way too much credit in this (and similar reactions) being a shallow symptom of a superficial and short lived problem. If it is rooted deeper as a cultural ideal or movement- well as you said, that’s a scary thought.

Maybe this year I should dress up as a narrow minded suburban mayor for Halloween.

I wonder how many folks who call white flight the red herring here were around even 10 or 20 years ago. It’s a ripple effect, like someone dropping a stone into water and watching the rings flow outward. Hickory Hill used to be a majority white neighborhood; that was only about ten years or so ago. North Mississippi is now flooded with ex-Memphians. I grew up near Olive Branch and remember when the only fast food place in town was the one Sonic near the old part of the town; now it’s a sea of parking lots and strip malls. Suburbanites can run as fast or as far as they want to, but reality will always catch up with them. All it does is spread the urban decay out over a larger area.

I brought my Boston born and bred girlfriend home in March to visit. We spent a lot of time downtown and she was really shocked at how many once beautiful buildings were boarded up and rotting. She came away with a pretty terrible opinion of our city. It doesn’t take a genius urban planner to see that racism is a, if not the, cause of it. Memphis doesn’t have legitimate reasons for this, like Detroit and other former industrial centers do. Memphis’ reason is just, “black people became enfranchised.”

Pack-
That assumes that white flight came first and was simply encouraged and enhanced by the real estate industry, highway lobby and financial institutions. There are those that believe white flight was in fact a result of the policies put in place by the interests mentioned and others. Basically, the ball was already rolling before white flight really became a force. At least that is one take.

Anon 6 whatever: Just to make a historical point clear- Boston was not a legally segregated city. 35 years ago there was a big local opposition to busing. The city still buses and the current criticisms of that system have nothing to do with race. What a novel concept! I live in an integrated, diverse neighborhood. It’s also a novel concept. Try it, you might like it!

I wasn’t around here when the rest of the white flight happened, but, I bet there is something to do with tanks and such rolling down Memphis streets after the MLK shooting. Who wants to live in that?

White flight didn’t come first.
The economic trap, withholding quality public education, wage disparity, and the “economic resegregation” you tacitly agreed to when Memphis “fake tried” desegregation in a dubious as possible manner, those came first.

That story about real estate agents, I’ve seen worse, but, that is pretty inexcusable.

The Hickory hood white flight is a WHOLE other issue, that was1/2 a Herenton fiasco. Empty the ghetto, don’t train people how to live in a nice neighborhood or educate them on the social contract of neighborhoods, and then just put them in Hickory and hope not to hear from them, withhold police services too, that’ll really help.
Now duplicate that in every black neighborhood in Memphis that you can get away with it, and you have what we have today.

If you’re against white flight and you blame it, cure it by moving back, some have, otherwise, it’s just a red herring.

Getting into action is a lot better than being :
Past based, which most of these arguments are, and that’s sad because it won’t help solve a thing.
Present tense hedonistic, which doesn’t get informed by the past, just wants to look at now without regard to the pasts mistakes or designing a future worth living into.

Future based is the way to go, get your heads wrapped around it or find a time machine that goes back to the past, because, the world is looking forward, that’s the new design, exactly what works.

Tom: I don’t get your love affair with Mark Norris. If I recall correctly, he’s always been an NRA lackey (having voted for the guns-in-bars bill), and a toady of the health care industry he represents as a private lawyer (tort “reform” being one of his biggest causes). He’s a Republican hack, through and through.

As for what I will always call the “toy towns,” the only reason they exist is because they have Memphis to leech off of. How many Germantowners work in Germantown? Same question for Bartlett, Collierville and the rest (Millingon is different—they leech off of the federal government).

If the Memphis refugees who live in these towns didn’t have Memphis to provide them their jobs, they wouldn’t have the money to pay the taxes that fund the services they receive, and their “cities” would die on the vine. Come to think of it, maybe it’s time Memphis started thinking of folks who work in the city, but live outside of it, as a form of outsourcing, and their towns as a form of tax havens, and offer Memphis “expats” (and the companies that employ them) incentives to move back into the city.

Actually there were and are several “genius urban planners” in Memphis. I know many, both young naive professionals and battered and beaten veterans.

It has always been politics, deep pocket developers and the weakness of Mayors/legislative bodies to implement plans and policies that have failed Memphis and Shelby County. Both City and County leaders are to blame.

City and County planners have tried their best and given their all over the last 30 years. But you can only beat a dead horse so much before it decomposes before your eyes.

Don’t blame the professionals. They can only advise; your elected officials adopt policy and implementation.

I see a lot of posts on Smart City MEM slamming the bedroom communities and the city-versus-county mindset. But let’s remember that many of those suburanites once lived in the city. Crime and a 5-times elected “I don’t give a damn” mayor were contributing factors to their leaving.

As for me, I live inside the loop in a nice 60 year old neighborhood. If I can invent a word, it is the “walkingest” neighborhood I have ever seen.

But keeping an area up requires some effort. Every weekend I drive around picking up litter that I’m sure is msotly thrown by people just driving thru the area, not residents of this neigborhood. The amount of litter on the streets is just over the top. It seems to be accepted here. I am encouraged by the Clean Memphis group of volunteers.

Well, I have gone off-topic. I just today discovered Smart City and I think this site is a nice enhancement for our city.

*IF* we assume that the problems in Hickory Hill, for example, are due in large part to “white flight”, the following questions are, I believe, very relevant.

1) What is it about “white flight” that has caused the problems?

2) Does it follow that if white flight hadn’t occured, Hickory Hill would not have the problems it currently has, and if so, why?

3) Are the problems of Hickory Hill due to a lower population of “whites” and if so, howso?

4) What is it about a higher concentration of “blacks” that contributes to the problem?

5) If you move to a new town, into a house where the prior resident has left town, how does this, either individually or as part of a mass transition, make the current problems of the community or town the fault of those who have left?

by Bill Day. Memphian Bill Day is two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning. His cartoons are syndicated internationally by Cagle Cartoons.Cartoons Archive →

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This is Smart City Consulting's blog and its purpose is to connect the dots and provide perspective on events, issues, and policies shaping Memphis and its future. Smart City Memphis was named one of the most intriguing blogs in the U.S. by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, it was voted the best Memphis blog in About.com's Reader's Choice Awards, and The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal wrote: "Smart City Memphis provides some of the most well-thought-out thinking about Memphis' past, present, and future you'll find anywhere." If you have questions, submissions, or ideas for posts, please email tjones@smartcityconsulting.com.